Our first full day

Our First Full Day: Ain Karem, Yad Vashem, and the Garden of Gethsemane.



I am having some trouble getting updates into this blog, but we will get it worked out.



My day started a bit before some of the others in our group of 37. While many of us were awakened by the sound blasting from a miniret calling Muslims to prayer around 4:30 this morning, I felt quite refreshed from our day of travel and went out for a walk through Bethlehem. I saw the Church of the Nativity as dawn came, wandered through it for a while and then said my morning prayer and office of readings there. I went through some streets for an hour and then came back for our huge breakfast and getting for the day. The very early morning is about the only time you can honestly sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” for it is not always still.



The day’s events did not really reflect the original schedule. This happens often in the Holy Land: weather, crowds, opportunities or a better plan affects things. So we headed out of Bethlehem, though the security check at the wall that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem. This massive wall virtually encircles Bethlehem. In some fashion or another it goes on (or will eventually be – it isn’t clear to me) for almost 500 miles. In much of that it is simply a fence. The goal on the part of Israel is safety; it also has divided natural neighborhood, grazing areas and more. In some places land has been confiscated, borders changed, and orchards destroyed and replaced by Jewish settlements – towns created in those spaces only for Jewish people of Israel (there are also Christian and Muslim people in Israel.



Our first was Ain Karem. This is in the hill country of Judea, just west of Jerusalem. It is considered to be the birthplace of John the Baptist, and so the place of the Visitation and where Zechariah’s and Mary’s canticles (Luke 1) can be found. We held a short prayer service there. I am amazed at the number of pilgrims who were there. This is a “second rung” site; I don’t always go there and have never seen more than one other group there at the time. Today there there 4-5 groups there.



(Things are more crowed overall here. When I first came in 1990, I think there were about 4.5 million people in Israel. There are now over nine million. Jerusalem was then about 250,000. Now it is over 900,000 in the area. Tourism is much higher. A good year was 2 million tourists. Last year it was over 4 million. When I first led a group here in 2004, the final year of the second Intifada, they numbered less than 1.5 million, and not many of them were Americans. Now the U.S. has the most tourists. )



From there we went to Yad Vashem, the official remembrance of the Holocaust. It is a difficult visit. The museum itself focuses on the NAZI campaigns to eliminate Jews in Europe. You zigzag across in a long narrow building filled with testimonies and artifacts of this horrific part of world history. Your final room in the museum is “the hall of names” which houses many thousands of black binders with the names and biographical information about those who were killed or put into concentration camps. They are still gathering data, and the are still shelves to fill. This is all displayed in a circular room with a pit in the center. It is a haunting place. As I left I signed the book, commenting, “a place of pain.”



Among the other buildings at Yad Vashem is a remembrance of the 1.5 million children who were killed in the concentration camps. There is very little light here. You shuffle along a circular path and see tens of thousands of lights reflected about you, as if lost in the universe, while the names and countries of the victims are read aloud.



From there we went off toward the Mount of Olives, stopping at a restaurant for a choice of falafel or shawarma. From there we went to the Mount of Olives itself, and got a great view of the Old City of Jerusalem. We walked down a very steep road which would be similar to that which Jesus took on Palm Sunday. The Kidron Valley lies between the Mount of Olives and the walled city of Jerusalem. We stopped for some time at the area which houses Dominus Flevit, a church built to commemorate Jesus weeping over the city of Jerusalem. There we got an extended lesson on the mountains that make up the area around Jerusalem (such as Mt. Moriah, where the temple was, and where Isaac was to be sacrificed), Mt. Calvary, or Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion; Mt. Zion, a bit more to the south side of Jerusalem, and, of course, the Mount of Olives. The city of Jerusalem itself is mentioned first in Genesis as Salem, where Melchizedek is its priest and king at the time of Abraham. Even 800 years later, at the time of David, it was a small city, outside of the current walls of Jerusalem. And indeed, the walls of Jerusalem were changed many times over the centuries as its fortunes changed. Calvary, now within the city walls, was not within it at the time of Jesus. In David’s time the city was only 13 acres (about the size of a domed stadium) The walls now encompass many times that, and the city was once larger.



We then moved down to the Garden of Gethsemane where we celebrated Mass in a private garden outside. The weather today was perfect, in the low 70s, with no wind. Aside from some traffic noise, it was fabulous. We sang some Mass parts and two hymns, and our musician Cindy played the flute as well. I reflected in part about the other side of the mountain, where the Judean desert begins. It had been pointed out to us. If Jesus had wanted, he could have slipped over the crest and in 30 minutes he would have been impossible to track. But he stayed, prayed and followed the way it had to be. His troubled prayer was answered; he rose able to face his betrayer and the night and day that followed.



Our last stop of the day was the other part of the garden which has trees that might be 2,000 years old, olive trees that might have been there at the time of Jesus. Gethsemane means “olive press” such as that used to crush olives for the oil. As to just where Jesus prayed, we cannot know, but the general area, within a 100 yards or so, is certain. The Church of All Nations, so named because funds were raised from people of a dozen nations to built it, was our last visit. Its columns are made to look like palm trees, and stars on the ceiling peek through the branches, all in mosaic.



We returned to Bethlehem by a different route and had dinner at 6:30. A few of us headed out for a short walk and a look at some shops in the Manger Square area.



Happy Birthday to Judy Hovanes, one of our group. She and Jesus celebrate their birthday in Bethlehem.

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